A Yoruba adage teaches that the story of anyone be not told until it has first been narrated by that person. Aa ki saju elede pe ede goes this wise saying of the wise ones of long, long ago. Indeed, who knows another person well enough to know all of his or her story? That is why it is not just unfair, but also immature, and, perhaps, spiritually criminal to judge another person. I mentioned the old-age Yoruba saying in respect of President Muhammadu Buhari who, in London last week, revealed to Nigerians that he was in hospital over there for eye, ear, and teeth problems he had been experiencing since 1978. That was 44 years ago, the year I graduated from youth service in Calabar, Cross River State. Telling his story himself removes some of the awkwardness President Buhari displays in public from the realms of speculation; hypothetically, if he is asked in the morning how his night went and if he slept well, the President may reply that Nigeria was well represented at the climate change summit!. That, for you, is a man hard of hearing. This example is extremely hypothetical, though. Often plodding outside the tracks, irrespective of his hearing aid, President Buhari’s managers must have learned to restrict him to script reading and managed questions in public, such as he was asked in London by the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) reporter. I guess the aim of the interview (I may be wrong) was to let Nigerians know the President had been going to London for medical help since 1978, about 37 years before he became President, and quell criticisms by the opposition parties of missadventures into the public purse to sanitise his health. The critics have been hateful, not objective. Is there a country on earth which does not spend money on the health of its President in or out of the country?
Even in the 2015 presidential campaigns, it was obvious General Buhari, as he then was, had health challenges. His voice was hardly audible, lacked staying power, and he spoke little. If his mandible, the largest bone in the skull which holds the lower teeth in place has a problem, the lower jaw may misalign with the upper jaw, causing speech inaudibility. The President teeth may also be experiencing calcium loss, molting, gingivitis (inflammation of the gums) and pyorrhea, purulent inflamation of teeth sockets which may lossen teeth and make them fall away.
If the President vision challenges were obstructive, they were not so evident then. Even now, what they are, are unclear. For the President still moves about, unaided. When I heard that he had been having vision challenges, I wondered how he had been managing to navigate piles of proposals for government policy such as National Assembly Bills for the 2022 Electoral Act or the Petroleum Industry Act. I know many grumbletonian Nigerians would ask: What did he come to do in government if he had those challenges? Persons like me, too, will wonder if they remembered that, in 2015, Nigeria was about to fall off the edge of the cliff and needed a rescuer whose mien fitted Buhari’s. As a person who faces vision , teeth and gum challenges myself, I wonder if I have no right under the Nigerian Constitution to become whatever I may wish to become in my country. I take strength from the American president who governed his country from a wheelchair. Of this man, goggle says:
“Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election in a landslide and became the first (and, as of 2021, only) physically-disabled person to be president of the United States. Before he moved into the White House, ramps were added to make it wheelchair friendly”.
Did former President Olusegun Obasanjo not row the boat, irrespective of blood sugar metabolism challenges? What of General Abdulsalami Abubakar who, it is said, wore a battery, the Pacemaker, in his heart)? Who knows what lies under the clothes of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, whose game plan in presidential election campiagns appears to be no national questions but the derobing of other candidates to capitalise on their health gaps. In 2019, Atiku sought to trap Gen. Buhari (rtd), as he then was, to a cul-de-sac in a face-to- face live television debate which Buhari wisely evaded. Atiku was garrulous. He entered the studio, asking: “Where is Buhari? Where is Buhari?” as though he had come for a physical duel. Buhari, tormented by his eyes, ears, gums and teeth and, perhaps, the mandible, as we can now assume, was far away, humble like a lamb and harmless like a rabbit, promising “CHANGE” . Both men are astute politicians.
After Buhari defeated him in 2019, Atiku handed Mallam Garba Shehu over to the new President to become the President’s special assistant (media and publicity). Mallam Garba was the special assistant (media) to Atiku when Atiku was vice- president to Olusegun Obasanjo for eight years. Atiku Abubakar would later be a chairman of the wedding ceremony of one of Buhari’s children. Both are Moslems, Fulani and from Northern Nigeria, which, going by the political antics of former military president General Ibrahim Babangida (rtd), Atiku, Iyorchia Ayu and Aminu Tambuwal, would not mind a Fulani succeeding a Fulani! I have brought this up because some of the southern members of President Buhari’s party, the APC, are not well disposed to the manner in which he replied to the question of the NTA reporter about the possibility of the APC wining next year’s election. As the sitting President of Nigeria, President Buhari is the chairman of the APC presidential campaign organisation. He tried to change the reporter’s doubt, if he had any, but ended up being not a terrific marketer of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the APC candidate, and ended up as he started off in the struggle for power in the eighth National Assembly: I AM FOR EVERYONE, I AM FOR NO ONE. In answering the question, I expected the President to not say everyone should vote for whoever he or she wanted, but exclusively for his party candidate. As he was meant to be their chief campaigner. I see the default, though, as the ways and means of a man who talks little for whatever reason and not how some persons are, unfortunately, misconstructing it as…Ma a jolo, mo nbo lehin e (Dance on, I am coming right behind you). President Buhari is not known to ambush or ditch his friends. If anything, he swims or drowns with them. He does not change his ministers. It is under pressure that he removes errant public officials. Even when his friend, gGeneral Sanni Abacha (rtd), was confirmed a common thief, President Buhari declined to join in his denigration.
THE TEETH PROBLEMS
I feel for President Buhari because, like him, I have eye and teeth problems, and, so, I know how they may seek to delimit the person they challenge, if they are permitted to do so. Today, I was to present a column on ONPASSIVE, the world’s biggest internet solution company which was launched last Sunday, November 20, simultaneously with the start of the 2022 QATAR WORLD CUP tournament, of which it is a sponsor, a rear attainment for a start up company. There was a black-out, which compounded my vision challenge. The videos and clips of the launch of this biggest internet company on earth were late in coming, as was the live webinar. I was already 24 hours late on my deadline to submit this column to the Editor. So, I decided to write, instead, on President Buhari’s health. Unknown to me, I wrote on all 40 pages of a whole school exercise book on which I had previously written another column. I went to bed about 3.30 am on Monday morning only to be woken up at about 6.am and be told by the person who was to type the manuscript that everything I wrote was mangled up with some other stuff. What could I do? Ti ise ko ba peni, a ki i p’ese . (If work doesn’t delay us, we don’t delay work)!. Proverbs of our forebears always show us the right way. So, I went back to my writing desk and knocked out this column in about four hours later. With this kind of experience, I can only be sympathetic to President Buhari and to any other challenged person and not malign them. The Americans taught us to be civilised in the landslide election of wheelchair-bound Roosevelt as their president. There is a lesson also from the Jews. Moshe Danyan lost one eye in the battle field during the Second World War, while he was defending his people against Germany.
Nevertheless, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Defence and Minister of Foreign Affairs by various governments even when he was in opposition parties. Google reports one former Prime Minister saying of him: “Once Ben Gurion had asked me—what do I think of the decision to appoint Dayan as the Minister of Agriculture in his government. I said that it is important that Dayan sits in every government because of his brilliant mind…”
For Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the message in Roosevelt’s and Moshe Danyan should be clear: the cap sits best on the head of the man who can think and act best, as his pedigree shows, not necessary the man who can walk from Maiduguri to Badagry or from Sokoto to Calabar.
My own teeth and gum problems began in the 1980s when I was thirty-something. I had read and heard about how children detested the dentist. So, I was reluctant to sit in that chair when I accompanied my wife to her dentist for “cleaning and polishing” and she suggested I, too, give my teeth a treat. The dentist said he found about six or eight teeth likely to develop holes in one year or so and that I may lose them if I did not get them “filled” right away. My ldea of”filling”then was like the patching of cratered ashphalt roads. But by the time the dentist set on the fourth and I was smelling flaking teeth material everywhere, I knew I was in trouble, and declined to go ahead with the other four. It was about two or three years after that the reality of what had happened dawned on me. A conference of dentists and oral hygiene workers in Germany revealed to the world that the MERCURY in the mercury amalgam substance used in the tooth “fillings” could vapourise under heat or cold conditions, impact the gums, teeth and mandible sometimes so dangerously that it may even cause cancer. Some Germans and other Europeans took off their otherwise healthy tooth/teeth with fillings. Some got the Mercury amalgam drilled out and replaced with plastic filling. Some sued their dentist. Plastic fillings were discovered soon to impact petroleum residues in the mouth and body, since plastics are sourced from petroleum. The dental market and industry was in a swoon which gave wings to CHELATION therapies of all sorts.
In chelation therapy, a chelated substance is taken to combine with a dangerous material and, literally speaking, drag it out of the body. I suspected I was heading for trouble when I would be woken from deep sleep in the dead of the night by a pain on my tongue or in the cheek or in the roof of the mouth which resembled a knife stab and the pain which resulted from rubbing on the injury the paste of fresh pepper. I knew it was time to begin a chelation therapy. To chelate mercury and other dangerous heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and even arsenic which are found sometime plentiful in Nigeria’s drinking water and food crops, I began zinc chelation by taking chelated zinc with my meals or in- between them when the stomach was empty. Later, I tried EDTA chelation. Before long, I discovered CHLORELLA, the blue green algae. It was reputed to chelate the brain of heavy metals and discharge it’s “haul” into the blood stream. As this may impact other organs with more than their fare share of heavy metals, CILANTRO was soon discovered able to chelate heavy metals out of the blood stream. This is a prophet which has no value in his land. If I call it by its more popular name, coriander, I may demystify it. More down to earth, I can still bring it if I call it the name great-grand mothers in Yoruba land called it .. EFO EBOLO (d.m:r.d.d) or EBOLO vegetable. The modern woman despises its smell or even taste. Yet this vegetable removes heavy metals from the blood and organs and is reputed to be helpful in particular in the protection of and restoration of urinary system health. This involves the kidneys, uretha, urinary bladder, prostate gland and the uretha. It is conjectural if cilantro may not help prostate gland challenge which is very widespread today, perhaps from accumulations of chemical toxins and heavy metals alongside microbial infestation and nutritional deficiencies. Who knows if the accumulation of zinc in the prostate gland has to do with the arrest of heavy metals and their chelation from this organ. For the spread of prostate problems downstream the age brackets where sexual exposure and activity is more rife than before, leading to losses of zinc in constant ejaculations without dietary or food supplement refurbishment, a possible serious cause of this problem may not be too difficult to discern.
Heavy metals have been known to cause many problems, including premature ejaculation, low sperm count and damaged sperm. So does nickel which is believed to have an affinity for the prostate gland and induced there by an alcohol substance used to sanitise bottles for packaging uses.
Before I knew what was going on, some of my teeth began to shake, grow larger, displace some of their mates and even seem to grow longer. This last tendency may suggest an upward mobility or a loosening process. To mitigate pain, I tried ACTIVATED CHARCOAL which mops germs, toxins and heavy metals. I also tried DIATOM ( Diatomaceous Earth, or DE) and MARIA TREBEN BITTERS. This is a formula which Maria TREBEN, a legendary Austrian herbalist of our time, found up from the treasure throne of a man who died at the age of 104 years after he fell off a horse he was riding. She presented this formula with its 42 uses in her book of herbs titled HELP THROUGH GOD’S PHARMACY. Mother nature is never done with helpful remedies. I enjoy CLOVE OIL. It is antiseptic, antibiotic, digestive and anodyne (pain relieving). One to three drops of the inedible essential Clove oil placed in a 1.5 liter bottle of water, shaken well to mix the water and the oil, may bring tremendous relief in tooth-ache when it is swirled around the mouth, gums and teeth and held there for about five minutes before it is spat out. FRANKINSCENCE OIl used similarly, also brings relief. Lately, I hardly go to bed without draping the teeth and gums in GRAPE SEED OIL. Grape seed extract has been widely reported to be one of the world’s greatest antioxidants and good for use in all manner of conditions. A proprietary blend, sometimes, mentioned in this column goes by the name RESTORE LYFE which suggests evidence about its restorative potentials. In all sorts of infections, Grape seed oil added to Oregano oil and Black seed oil have beneficial potentials. I have not sighted BLUE VERVAIN for years. It is a great herb for many conditions, especially those of the gum and teeth. But, lately, I have enlisted garlic and lime. In 1747, Dr James Kind arrested bleeding gums and falling teeth among British sailors by giving them lime, orange and lemon juices. Today, by convention, gin is served with lime on ships and the sailors are called LIMEYS.
I sympathise with President Buhari. His vision challenge may be glaucoma or cataract of the eye lens which this column often discusses. The hearing loss may have come from battlefield noise, from artillery and bomb noises in the Nigeria-Biafra (1966-70) Civil War. This may be why he is an unrepentant unitarist and has in eight years given little or no pep for true federalism. The continual detention of Sunday Igboho and Nnamdi Kanu may, therefore, have nothing to do with a Fulanising agenda in Nigeria but with a man so obsessed with keeping together, whatever the cost, disparate nations yearning for freedom. In that case, he is more like a WINSTON CHURCHILL, the British Prime Minister, who was not prepared to “preside over the liquidation of Her Majesty’s Empire”. But where are those colonies today? Where is Winston himself and where is Her Royal Mayesty? We, like our world, are like birds of passage in the bowels of External Time….LIFE.
Thanks, President Buhari for giving Nigerians the opportunity to share the health privacy of their President and to know that, like him, they should look after their eyes, ears, gum and teeth.
